ODE, which looks like it will be the open source collision detection/physics library we will be using (if you have linux, check it out on the front page), has support for many different collision shapes. Having too complex shapes does make things slow, but making up your shape out of a few well-placed cubes is a nice compromise. ODE has a lot of other really neat things to it, so if they get it in, the Blender game engine will be much better than it was before:)

It should be possible to implement a joystick control using the joystick class from the pygame-libraries (http://www.pygame.org). I haven't tried this, so I can't say it for sure, but I also can't see anything that would make this impossible. Someone else has tried this?

>Also, it would be great if collision bounding could actually be set to the >shape of an object and not just spherical.[/b]

blender 2.x has solid 3.0 collision detection. it can do concave-concave 'polygon soup' collision detection, and convex-convex polyhedra.
It works all very fast, using GJK, AABB trees, written by Gino van den Bergen. This collision detection is much better then what ODE has offered yet. However you are talking about the collision response. This is a different story, and sumo (Solid Uses MOto) physics is impulse based, and this required penetration depth. Although we had it up and running internally, we only released dynamic object for spheres (penetration depth is rather trivial). So even if we replace sumo with ode, we will need to have a good collision detection. Ode's coldet. is very rudimentary at the moment, but there is recent progress, so cross your fingers.